page_title: Holocaust victims
section_title: Homosexuality
hierarchical_section_title: Holocaust victims / Homosexuality
caption_attribution_description: English: A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of "un-German" books on the Opernplatz in Berlin.Čeština: Pálení knih v Berlíně, z 10. května 1933 Русский: Сожжение книг в нацистской Германии 10 мая 1933 года
context_page_description: During The Holocaust, millions of people died or were killed in Nazi Germany. These Holocaust victims included about six million Jewish people. They also included five million of people who were not Jewish, mainly Poles and Roma.
  Holocaust victims died in many ways. Millions were murdered by the Nazis, especially in concentration camps and extermination camps. Many others died in camps and ghettoes from diseases, starvation, and freezing to death, caused by the terrible living conditions. Others in areas that Nazi Germany took over died from famine and other causes.
  When all these people are added up, historians estimate that between 19 million and 22 million people died during The Holocaust. Holocaust victims came from many different countries, religions, ethnic groups, and cultures. The Nazis wanted to kill them for many different reasons.
context_section_description: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people were also victims of The Holocaust.  The Nazis were especially cruel to gay men.  They thought that homosexual people hurt Nazi Germany in a few ways:
  The Nazis thought gay men were too weak and too much like women to be able to fight for Nazi Germany
  The Nazis wanted "Aryan" Germans to have as many children as possible, but gay men would not be creating children
  The Nazis thought homosexuality was contagious, and that other Germans would become homosexual just by being around gay people
  By 1936, Heinrich Himmler was trying to use Germany's laws, and make new laws, to persecute gay men.  At least 100,000 gay German men were arrested, and 50,000 were convicted and put in prison. Some were forced into state-run psychiatric hospitals.  Courts ordered hundreds of European gay men living in Nazi-controlled areas to be castrated with chemicals.
  Between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps.  They were often treated even worse than other prisoners. They had to wear a pink triangle on their shirts, just like men convicted of sexually abusing children and having sex with animals.
  Lesbians were not usually treated as badly as gay men.  They were usually not put in prison just because they were lesbians. In the concentration camps, they usually wore a black triangle.
  According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals. Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorise German homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more."
  After World War II, many homosexuals who were liberated from the concentration camps were still persecuted in Germany. They could be charged under Paragraph 175, a law which made "lewdness between men" illegal.  If they were convicted, they would be sent to prison.  (The time they spent in the concentration camps would be subtracted from their sentences.)  This was very different from how other Holocaust victims were treated.  Other victims were compensated (given money) for the loss of family members and educational opportunities.  Gay victims were treated like criminals.
caption: On May 10, 1933, the Nazis burned 20,000 books about homosexuality from the Institute for Sex Research's library.  They also took lists of homosexual people from the Institute so they could persecute those people[32]
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